Sorry I've confused you.

No, not at all. Starting out, you can just learn the chord shapes and know the names of them. You can safely forget about scales. In the future, it may be good to understand how chords are put together and how they relate to scales.

To answer your original question though (the difference between major and minor chords), I had to get into some of that.

So, if you are just starting out, I would say you can safely memorize the chord shapes (major and minor) and their names. Once you have that down, you can come back to this if your curiosity gets the best of you.

I've been playing for 30 years and I had to look up what the notes of the A major scale are, so don't feel like you have to memorize anything. You can get a lot of mileage out of just know chord (and eventually scale) shapes. Though it does help to know where the shapes come from one you become interested in either song writing or improvisation.

Enjoy!